What the Obama 'Machine' Looks Like to Newt Gingrich

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When Newt Gingrich started using the phrase "secular socialist machine" to describe the Obama administration this spring, I had just interviewed Mickey Edwards as part of my reporting for a long profile in Esquire. As a Republican congressman from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1993, an advisor to Ronald Reagan, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, chairman (for five years) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, Edwards had an intimate and unusually privileged view of Gingrich's rise to power.

Here, before I get to some more of the truly unsettling things the former Speaker of the House laid bare in our interview, are some of the startling things Edwards told me:

My biggest concern is that Newt is very good at self promotion, and one of the problems with that is sometimes people who are that way — they don't think enough about the consequences of what they do and what the fallout is.... I never felt that he had any sort of a real compass about what he believed except for the pursuit of power.

When you're in Congress, you should be guided by a set of principles. Seeking power alone is not a good enough principle. And the way he did it was essentially to reshape, from the standpoint of Republicans, our whole system of government; rather than 435 individual house members dealing with the issues on the table using your best judgment in the interest of your constituents, he did it more as party against party.

In The Contract With America, two items were unconstitutional on their face: the line-item veto and term limits. He really didn't care whether they were constitutional or not.

He reshaped it all. This is a war, he said, and it's our party against their party. I think we've seen the results of that. I'm a believer in conflict because I believe in the democratic process, but when you do that solely on your-club-against-my-club, you're eroding our whole democratic process.

How did Gingrich enforce his will, I asked the former congressman. He continued:

Newt came up with a couple of strategies. Before that, my job and every other member's was to raise enough money to get yourself elected. Newt really started leaning on members to raise money and put it into a separate pool just to knock off Democrats — not targeting Democrats who were particularly bad or particularly liberal, just That guy has a "D" on his head and we're going to knock off every one we can."

The other thing was to bring issues to the floor as wedge issues — to try to devise issues, regardless of whether they were good or bad policy, just to try to embarrass a Democrat. Which is really not the purpose of the Congress of the United States. It demeaned the whole process. It took Congress away from its role as a lawmaking body to just a group fighting nonstop political battles. I thought it was embarrassing and very harmful to our form of government. Frank Luntz would do a survey and find out what the people wanted, and that's what we were for.

Gingrich could be particularly imperious in committee meetings, Edwards said.

I remember one time when he just simply announced in a leadership meeting on some issue, "This is what we're going to do." I just looked at him and said, "I'm sorry, I'm chairman of the policy committee. We'll have a meeting and we'll tell you."

The problem I have with Newt is, I'm an institutionalist. I really believe in our constitutional system, and I think he doesn't care about the system — he cares about power. That's dangerous. That's scary.

He was the one who really more than anybody got Republicans to start thinking of themselves not in terms of their constitutional obligations, but thinking of themselves first as Republicans. The classic example of when this came back to haunt us is when George Bush became president and started doing these things that were unconstitutional, like his signing statements. Republicans rallied to support him. My whole life has been in the conservative movement, and if Lyndon Johnson did those things we would have had a mass protest. But they went along with it because he was their leader. That's the fruit of what Newt brought.

Shortly after this conversation, I interviewed Gingrich in his offices on K Street in Washington. I asked the question as directly as I could, and I'm going to give you the conversation complete with all the breaks and ellipses to make the style and substance of his response as clear as possible:

"This is something that sort of bugs me in your book, when you're talking about the secular socialist machine — that just seems silly to me, because the Republicans had a machine when you were in power."

Gingrich answered in a smooth and silky voice. "I don't remember the Republicans ever getting $787 billion dollars with no one having read the bill."

"Yeah, but still — politics is creating a machine, creating alliances ..."

"That's just not true."

"You talk about the unions and ignore business."

"But that's just explicitly untrue."

"Really?"

"Yes, it's explicitly untrue. There's a difference between creating a team and creating a machine. And these people, in my judgment, these people have crossed the line. These people are like Chicago."

"Really?"

"The Chicago machine couldn't care less what you think as an individual citizen, because they will run over you."

"And Nixon was different? Nixon cared what the individual ... Aren't all politicians about getting their programs into law, making deals, making compromises, getting support from influential groups? What's the Chamber of Commerce but part of the Republican machine?"

"No."

"And it's a powerful part."

"No. If you are determined to avoid the word, you can avoid the word. Or you can debase the word. A machine is an institution which acquires power irrespective of public opinion and which uses that power to sustain itself irrespective of that public opinion. By any normal standard in American politics, when they lost Massachusetts they should have backed off and gone for a compromise. They had lost the town halls to the point where they couldn't even hold them. They had aroused the Tea Party movement. Every national poll said people rejected the bill. And they lost Teddy Kennedy's seat? And they don't stop and say maybe we've gone a step too far? That's a machine."

"It seems to me that they must have cared what the public believed in because the public voted them into office by a substantial majority."

"No, the public voted the Republicans out of office for somebody who never ran, telling the public what he would do."

"Okay, but now you're just interpreting the events according to your ..."

"And so are you. I don't intend to argue with you. You want to ask my opinion — I used the word 'machine' deliberately, because I believe that's what institutionally what they believe in. I think that's what Rahm Emmanuel believes in. And you go back and read the book about Emmanuel in '06, what you're watching is a machine politician at work. I think if you look at the background that Obama has in Chicago, that is a machine. If you look at the people who he worked with in Springfield, they were corrupt. Springfield is one of the most corrupt capitals in this country. And if you watch how they pass bills, it's a combination of bullying and blackmail. Not blackmail — bullying and bribery. And I think it's fundamentally wrong."

"And it's that different from politics as usual?"

"Yes. This group is so far away from the country's norms. Fifty-eight percent of the country wants to repeal the health bill? There's no time in modern history you see a major reform, after it was passed, that 58 percent want to repeal it. There's something fundamentally wrong with the system — a violation of the constitutional process. The Founding Fathers designed a process to deliberately be so slow that you couldn't pass things against the long-term judgment of the country."

"Well, but every so often, the people vote [for] a unified Senate, House, and Presidency ..."

"There's a guy running in the special election, he's running ads saying he wants to eliminate coal and he goes and raises money with Nancy Pelosi, and he takes the money he raises from the most liberal Speaker in American history and a vice-president who is against coal in order to run an ad saying 'I'm really not them.' And if he gets to Washington, he will be them. And you know he will be them because you just watch how they passed the health bill. I mean, when they broke Stupak and he decided not to run for re-election, I think it was a statement of how bad the machine is. And I am very happy to defend the term 'machine.' And — just go out and ask the average person — if you can get $787 billion dollars and no one has read the bill. That's a machine. That's not representative self-government."

At that point, Gingrich's assistant told me my time was up. But Gingrich continued:

"I'll be happy to defend that phrase. Those three words were picked deliberately. And I'll be glad to defend them anywhere in the country for the next three years."

So, to review, Gingrich said that Obama ignores public opinion, a statement that any rational person would have trouble believing. He said Obama "couldn't care less what the individual citizen thinks," another absurd statement. He said that it was unusual for a politician to keep pushing an unpopular policy — a bizarre notion that would have startled every president from George Washington to George W. Bush. By association, he put Obama down there with Boss Daley, who held power in Chicago before Obama got out of high school. By inference, he charged Obama with the crime of blackmail, without offering the slightest bit of evidence. Gingrich said there was some constitutional requirement to not pass bills quickly, which is a) false to the point of being weird and b) quite a remarkable characterization of a bill that famously took one year of debate (and another five decades of effort) to pass. He said that Joe Biden is "against coal," which overlooks Biden's consistent official-platform support for clean coal in favor of one offhand comment on a rope line which Biden subsequently repudiated. He suggested that when a candidate runs on a platform that he intends to fulfill is somehow "machine" behavior. And he suggested that Bart Stupak quit Congress because the Democrats "broke" him, which ignores the death threats and pictures of nooses Stupak got from Republicans, which he said made his life "a living hell."

After all this, it was hard not to think that Mickey Edwards hit the nail on the head. The things Gingrich said weren't really arguments so much as weapons. He didn't seem to have any interest in or expectation of actually convincing me — I felt like his conduit to the Tea Party types who would swallow his arguments without a sniff test.

Then I tracked down his ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, the woman he divorced after eighteen years of marriage because he was having an affair with a Congressional staffer who was twenty-three years younger than he was, and discovered the story was even more complicated than I thought — a story I tell in the latest issue of Esquire....